You know, I’m really starting to see this as a power struggle. Nunes and Schiff are just trying to outdo each other. The memo wars have become more about who can come out on top rather than an effort to expose the truth. But I digress.

House Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) released his memo Sunday and claimed it refuted the memo released by Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA). Of course, it took no time for Nunes to refute Schiff’s memo, leading Schiff to release his own fact sheet. (See what I mean? They both want the last word.)

Background: Nunes released his memo earlier this month that alleged the FBI used the disputed dossier on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, authored by Christopher Steele, to receive a warrant to spy on Trump’s former campaign member Carter Page.

Schiff released his memo this weekend that he claims counters Nunes’ memo, but it confirmed the main point of the GOP memo…that the officials used information from the unverified source to get that warrant. There were also some other agreements with the GOP memo.

But the power struggle between these two continues because there are parts of Nunes’ memo that remain unclear. Here are the main refutations Nunes provided:

Honestly, I don’t care how much information they used. The fact is they used information from an unverified dossier that even former FBI Director James Comey called salacious to get a warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen.

Comments

“The memo wars have become more about who can come out on top rather than an effort to expose the truth.” Exactly. Enough of these games. Until Hillary, Comey, and several others are given the perp walk, all these memo wars amount to is a spat among factions of an elite that couldn’t care less about the Rule of Law.

Schiff’s memo was a total bust, simply because of the timing, if nothing else. First, it was delayed 4 weeks – to have any effect, it needed to come out at the same time as the Nunes memo, but Schiff thought he could block that one so he didn’t start writing his until the Nunes memo was already finished. 2nd, Saturday Afternoon release? Pathetic – he may have been aiming for the Sunday talk shows, but the shooting and the Broward Coward erased that. And 3rd, there was nothing in that memo that hadn’t already been said and that we didn’t already no. (contra the Nunes memo which confirmed that the Dossier was relied on by the FBI when they applied for a warrant)

So 3 strikes, and it adds up to a colossal waste of effort with no impact at all on the situation.

“Chairman Nunes reminds everyone of two key points: #1) the FBI and DOJ have to own up to what happened, regardless of consequence, and then commit to structural reform; and #2) the vast majority of U.S. media participated in the conspiracy through their participation with the Clinton-Steele Dossier and promotion of leaks from ideologues within the intelligence community. Therefore the same media cannot be expected to expose the corruption they helped create.”

Do you remember how Schiff for Brains ran out of the Committee Meeting to ILLEGALLY LEAK to the Evil MSM?

“Today during a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff admitted to being the source for the false reporting (December of 2017) by CNN’s Manu Raju – surrounding the Donald Trump Jr. and the wrong dates on the Wikileaks email.”

“The emerging business models of the Times and the Wall Street Journal are slowly traveling back in time to recover the subscription-first model that dominated the industry before the 1830s—with one important catch. The 1830s were a heyday of local papers; without the advent of telegraphs or telephones, news didn’t travel well. But today it’s local news organizations that are suffering the most. “People in Cleveland and Dallas and San Diego have not only stopped subscribing to their local newspapers…”

This characterization is wrong. Nunes IS on top. Nunes has the facts and Schiff is squirming like a snake trying and failing to cover his corrupted self. To equate them, to put them on equal footing is flatly wrong.

The ethics charge against Nunes was a transparent attempt by lieberals to shut down and discredit Nunes, to suppress any investigation which might expose the extensive malfeasance engaged in by the Democrat Crime Syndicate in the 2016 election.

Pandora’s Box has been opened. The Schiff memo “Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them” –

Mary Chastain: Honestly, I don’t care how much information they used. The fact is they used information from an unverified dossier that even former FBI Director James Comey called salacious to get a warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen.

Um, no. Comey said some of the content of the dossier was “salacious and unverified”. He did not say all of it was. That wouldn’t even make sense, as salacious only refers to content that “treats sexual matters in an indecent way”.

Also, Paige was a paid FBI informant who participated in a criminal prosecution. No one needed a warrant to wiretap him. He was a volunteer.

That is a lie, invented out of whole cloth by the Nuthouse. (Excuse me. The Nuthouse went even further and claimed he was an FBI employee. You’re moderating that to paid informant. But there is no evidence at all for either claim.)

But from a more Liberal publication that Milhouse can relate to about Carter:

“In an FBI transcript of Podobnyy discussing Page with a fellow SVR officer in April of 2013, he calls Page an “idiot,” but somebody who the Russians could work with because of his “enthusiasm” and desire “to earn lots of money.”

Yo Irv, I agree. Until a person or people are held to account this is all just grandstanding and a lot of hot wind amounting to nothing.
I cynically predict that no one will ever be held to account for any of this. Massive fraud and corruption in an Administration never before seen in this country and Congress, DoJ, and the media will eventually just shrug it all away. In the meantime only people such as you and me would face any type of criminal investigations.
The Teapot Dome scandal and Watergate are mere “Rolling through a stop sign” type crimes compared to this.

I want to know what the FISA judge who issued the warrant was thinking. Even if the judge believed the FBI’s lie that Steele was completely trustworthy, none of the information he supplied was from his own knowledge, so how could it justify a warrant? I’d like Nunes to subpoena the judge to testify (in executive session if necessary) on exactly why s/he concluded that probable cause existed. What information s/he was given, how s/he understood that information, what conclusions s/he drew from it, etc. That’s the only way to really get to the bottom of this.

The Republican plan here is to keep the issue of illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign alive. The Congressional investigations are being run merely to keep smoke in the air. There has been NO testimony before any of the investigating committees for several months now. The real fire is all within the DOJ IG’s investigation. So far, that has resulted in several demotions and two resignations.

When the IG’s investigation is released, it will clearly support the claims that a small group of very high ranking members of the DOJ/FBI used their positions to conduct unwarranted surveillance on the campaign of the opposition party’s candidate for President. It will further show this same group of people actively protected the Democrat presidential candidate from criminal charges. And, it will show that members of the Obama Administration were aware of this, to the highest level.

“Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.”

“The FBI Interviews of Carter Page
In the course of providing a skewed portrait of Carter Page’s background, the Schiff memo unintentionally highlights another deep flaw in the warrant application.

The memo limns Page as a master spy with disturbing “connections to Russian Government and Intelligence Officials” — which will be amusing to anyone who has seen an interview of Page, now a ubiquitous oddball media presence. What Democrats conveniently omit is that (a) Page cooperated with the FBI and Justice Department in a prior investigation in which his information was used to prosecute Russian spies; (b) the Russian spies explicitly regarded him as an “idiot” (and they had not even seen him on cable TV); and (c) since Russian operatives can be as diabolical and sophisticated as the Democrats suggest, they would have known that Page did not have the kind of relationship with Trump that would have made Page a suitable conduit for proposing traitorous deals — and as we’ve seen, the Russians had far better ways to approach Trump (e.g., the Kremlin-connected oligarch Aras Agalarov, who had a personal relationship with Trump and orchestrated the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting).

The memo does note that “the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian intelligence contacts.” Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI.

Why didn’t the FBI call Page in for an interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? It is a requirement of FISA law.

So . . . here’s the question: When Steele brought the FBI his unverified allegations that Page had met with Sechin and Divyekin, why didn’t the FBI call Page in for an interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? Lest you wonder, this is not an instance of me second-guessing the Bureau with an investigative plan I think would have been better. It is a requirement of FISA law.

When the FBI and DOJ apply for a FISA warrant, they must convince the court that surveillance — a highly intrusive tactic by which the government monitors all of an American citizen’s electronic communications — is necessary because the foreign-intelligence information the government seeks “cannot reasonably be obtained by normal investigative techniques.” (See FISA, Section 1804(a)(6)(C) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) Normal investigative techniques include interviewing the subject. There are, of course, situations in which such alternative investigative techniques would inevitably fail — a mafia don or a jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything he knows. But Carter Page was not only likely to do so, he had a documented history of providing information to the FBI.

It would be very interesting to see what the DOJ told the FISA court about why normal investigative techniques would not suffice to pry information from Page. They certainly seem to work fine for Fox News.”

Yep, agree. I think either Page was connected to the scheme team and the FISA was just a CYA. Page fits the same model as Steele. Russian connection. Since Nellie Orr also had that connection, I wonder what the relationship is between the three of them.

Nellie’s sister’s husband (Delano DuGarm) is also has a Russian connection:

Interesting is Nellie’s parents. There seems to be a connection with Kenya and Kathleen A. Hauke (Nellie’s mother) focus on Langston Hughes.

“Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism.”

So, you figure the Republicans should just fold up and allow Schiff’s flimsy BS to be the “last word”? That sounds like a losing tactic to me. The Republican party exists to fight the D’rats, not to shrug and say “oh, all right …” when dealing with their crimes.

Personally, I’d much prefer that the R’s do their jobs, rather than that they surrender as usual.

My mind cannot get past the fact that the FISA warrant against Page was presented to three separate Republican-appointed FISC judges who obviously found nothing inappropriate about the warrant applications. Additionally, the last two judges had to have been shown evidence of Carter communications that were somehow new evidence damning Carter Page and potentially others.

So McCarthy is leaning too heavy on the Republican view that we need to get to Hillary than the just-as-likely scenario that this whole thing is a diversion to protect Trump from his history of operating outside the law – which is why they fear Robert Mueller.

Top Republicans on Capitol Hill have made a concerted decisions in their Russia inquiries: They are staying away from digging into the finances of President Donald Trump and his family.

Six Republican leaders of key committees told CNN they see little reason to pursue those lines of inquiry or made no commitments to do so — even as Democrats say determining whether there was a financial link between Trump, his family, his business and Russians is essential to understanding whether there was any collusion in the 2016 elections.

Republicans have resisted calls to issue subpoenas for bank records, seeking Trump’s tax returns or sending letters to witnesses to determine whether there were any Trump financial links to Russian actors — calling the push nothing more than a Democratic fishing expedition.

gad-fly > 1) Why didn’t the FBI interview Carter Page as required by law? (per McCarthy); 2)FISC Judge Contreras has been removed” from the case presentencing and Judge Sullivan has demanded that all exculpatory evidence be turned over to him from Mueller – obviously some legal beagle of power suspects inappropriateness; 3) “the last two judges had to have been shown … new evidence damning Carter Page….” – Given the already known omissions of relevant facts and circumstances not submitted to the FISC at the time of the successful application and the two prior unsuccessful attempts to obtain the FISA warrant, I can’t believe that anything is “obvious” here.

Lastly the segue to Trump’s “history of operating outside the law” as the reason for the investigation seems to be silly – what evidence is there? Convictions? Charges? Nothing criminal . Maybe some civil issues that have been resolved.

So tell me, did Comey receive his JD at Trump U. and now wants a refund plus interest for a deficient law school ed? A bit of a stretch there.

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